Rest In Pieces (6 page)

Fitz-Gilbert Hamilton’s den struck Blair as a hymn to Princeton. How much orange and black could anyone stand? Fitz-Gilbert made a point of showing Blair his crew picture. He even showed him his squash picture from Andover Academy. Blair asked him what had happened to his hair, which Fitz-Gilbert took as a reference to his receding hairline. Blair hastily assured him that was not what he’d meant; he’d noticed that the young Fitz-Gilbert was blond. Little Marilyn giggled and said that in school her husband dyed his hair. Fitz-Gilbert blustered and said that all the guys did it—it didn’t mean anything.

The upshot of this conversation was that the following morning Fitz-Gilbert appeared in the post office with blond hair. Harry stared at the thatch of gold above his homely face and decided the best course would be to mention it.

“Determined to live life as a blond, Fitz? Big Marilyn must be wearing off on you.”

Mim flew to New York City once every six weeks to have her hair done and God knows what else.

“Last night my wife decided, after looking through my yearbooks, that I look better as a blond. What do you think? Do blonds have more fun?”

Harry studied the effect. “You look very preppy. I think you’d have fun whatever your hair color.”

“I could never have done this in Richmond. That law firm.” He put his hands around his neck in a choking manner. “Now that I’ve opened my own firm I can do what I want. Feels great. I know I do better work now too.”

“I don’t know what I’d do if I had to dress up for work.”

“Worse than that, you couldn’t take the cat and dog to work with you,” Fitz-Gilbert observed. “You know, I don’t think people were meant to work in big corporations. Look at Cabell Hall, leaving Chase Manhattan for Allied National years ago. After a while the blandness of a huge corporation will diminish even the brightest ones. That’s what I like so much about Crozet. It’s small; the businesses are small; people are friendly. At first I didn’t know how I’d take the move from Richmond. I thought it might be dull.” He smiled. “Hard for life to be dull around the Sanburnes.”

Harry smiled back but wisely kept her mouth shut. He left, squeezing his large frame into his Mercedes 560SL, and roared off. Fitz and Little Marilyn owned the pearlized black SL, a white Range Rover, a silver Mercedes 420SEL, and a shiny Chevy half-ton truck with four-wheel drive.

As the day unfurled the temperature dropped a good fifteen to twenty degrees. Roiling black clouds massed at the tips of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The rain started before Harry left work. Mrs. Hogendobber kindly ran Harry back home although she complained about having Mrs. Murphy and Tucker in her car, an ancient Ford Falcon. She also complained about the car. This familiar theme—Mrs. Hogendobber had been complaining about her car since George bought it new in 1963—lulled Harry into a sleepy trance.

“. . . soon time for four more tires and I ask myself, Miranda, is it worth it? I think, trade this thing in, and then I go over to the Brady-Bushey Ford car lot and peruse those prices and, well, Harry, I tell you, my heart fairly races. Who can afford a new car? So it’s patch, patch, patch. Well, would you look at that!” she exclaimed. “Harry, are you awake? Have I been talking to myself? Look there, will you.”

“Huh.” Harry’s eyes traveled in the direction of Mrs. Hogendobber’s pointing finger.

A large sign swung on a new post. The background was hunter-green, the sign itself was edged in gold, and the lettering was gold. A fox peered out from its den. Above this realistic painting it read
FOXDEN
.

“
That
must have cost a pretty penny.” Mrs. Hogendobber sounded disapproving.

“Wasn’t there this morning.”

“This Bainbridge fellow must have money to burn if he can put up a sign like that. Next thing you know he’ll put up stone fences, and the cheapest, I mean the cheapest, you can get for that work is thirty dollars a cubic foot.”

“Don’t spend his money for him yet. A pretty sign doesn’t mean he’s going to go crazy and put all his goods in the front window, so to speak.”

As they pulled into the long driveway leading to Harry’s clapboard house, she asked Miranda Hogendobber in for a cup of tea. Mrs. Hogendobber refused. She had a church club meeting to attend and furthermore she knew Harry had chores. Given the continuing drop in the temperature and the pitch clouds sliding down the mountain as though on an inky toboggan ride, Harry was grateful. Mrs. H. peeled down the driveway and Harry hurried into the barn, Mrs. Murphy and Tucker way in front of her.

Her heavy barn jacket hung on a tack hook. Harry threw it on, tugged off her sneakers and slipped on duck boots, and slapped her Giants cap on her head. Grabbing the halters and lead shanks, she walked out into the west pasture just in time to get hit in the face with slashing rain. Mrs. Murphy stayed in the barn but Tucker went along.

Tomahawk and Gin Fizz, glad to see their mother, trotted over. Soon the little family was back in the barn. Picking up the tempo, the rain pelted the tin roof. A stiff wind knifed down from the northeast.

As Harry mixed bran with hot water and measured out sweet feed, Mrs. Murphy prowled the hayloft. Since everyone had made so much noise getting into the barn, the mice were forewarned. The big old barn owl perched in the rafters. Mrs. Murphy disliked the owl and this was mutual, since they competed for the mice. However, harsh words were rarely spoken. They had adopted a live-and-let-live policy.

A little pink nose, whiskers bristling, stuck out from behind a bale of timothy.
“Mrs. Murphy.”

“Simon, what are you doing here?”
Mrs. Murphy’s tail went to the vertical.

“Storm came up fast. You know, I’ve been thinking, this would be a good place to spend the winter. I don’t think your human would mind, do you?”

“As long as you stay out of the grain I doubt she’ll care. Watch out for the blacksnake.”

“She’s already hibernating . . . or she’s playing possum.”
Simon’s whiskers twitched devilishly.

“Where?”

Simon indicated that the formidable four-foot-long blacksnake was curled up under the hay on the south side of the loft, the warmest place.

“God, I hope Harry doesn’t pick up the bale and see her. Give her heart failure.”
Mrs. Murphy walked over. She could see the tip of a tail—that was it.

She came back and sat beside Simon.

“The owl really hates the blacksnake,”
Simon observed.

“Oh, she’s cranky about everything.”

“Who?”

“You,”
Mrs. Murphy called up.

“I am not cranky but you’re always climbing up here and shooting off your big mouth. Scares the mice.”

“It’s too early for you to hunt.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that you have a big mouth.”
The owl ruffed her feathers, then simply turned her head away. She could swivel her gorgeous head around nearly 360 degrees, and that fascinated the other animals. Four-legged creatures had a narrow point of view as far as the owl was concerned.

Mrs. Murphy and Simon giggled and then the cat climbed back down the ladder.

By the time Harry was finished, Mrs. Murphy and Tucker eagerly scampered to the house.

Next door, Blair, cold and soaked to the skin, also ran into his house. He’d been caught by the rain a good half-mile away from shelter.

By the time he dried off, the sky was obsidian with flashes of pinkish-yellow lightning, an unusual fall thunderstorm. As he went into the kitchen to heat some soup, a deafening crack and blinding pink light knocked him back a foot. When he recovered he saw smoke coming out of the transformer box on the pole next to his house. The bolt had squarely hit the transformer. Electric crackles continued for a few moments and then died away.

Blair kept rubbing his eyes. They burned. The house was now black and he hadn’t any candles. There was so much to do to settle in that he hadn’t gotten around to buying candles or a lantern yet, much less furniture.

He thought about going over to Harry’s but decided against it, because he was afraid he’d look like a wuss.

As he stared out his kitchen window another terrifying bolt of lightning hurtled toward the ground and struck a tree halfway between his house and the graveyard. For a brief moment he thought he saw a lone figure standing in the cemetery. Then the darkness again enshrouded everything and the wind howled like Satan.

Blair shivered, then laughed at himself. His stinging eyes were playing tricks on him. What was a thunderstorm but part of Nature’s brass and percussion?

7

Tree limbs lay on the meadows like arms and legs torn from their sockets. As Harry prowled her fence lines she could smell the sap mixed in with the soggy earth odor. She hadn’t time to inspect the fifty acres in hardwoods. She figured whole trees might have been uprooted, for as she had lain awake last night, mesmerized by the violence of the storm, she could hear, off in the distance like a moaning, the searing cracks and crashes of trees falling to their deaths. The good news was that no trees around the house had been uprooted and the barn and outbuildings remained intact.

“I hate getting wet,”
Mrs. Murphy complained, pulling her paws high up in the air and shaking them every few steps.

“Go back to the house then, fussbudget.”
This exaggerated fastidiousness of Mrs. Murphy’s amused and irritated Tucker. There was nothing like a joyous splash in the creek, a romp in the mud, or if she was really lucky, a roll in something quite dead, to lift Tucker’s corgi spirits. And as she was low to the ground, she felt justified in getting dirty. It would be different if she were a Great Dane. Many things would be different if she were a Great Dane. For one thing, she could just ignore Mrs. Murphy with magisterial dignity. As it was, trying to ignore Mrs. Murphy meant the cat would tiptoe around and whack her on the ears. Wouldn’t it be fun to see Mrs. Murphy try that if she were a Great Dane?

“What if something important happens? I
can’t
leave.”
Mrs. Murphy shook mud off her paw and onto Harry’s pants leg.
“Anyway, three sets of eyes are better than one.”

“Jesus H. Christ on a raft.”

The dog and cat stopped and looked in the direction of Harry’s gaze. The creek between her farm and Foxden had jumped its banks, sweeping everything before it. Mud, grass, tree limbs, and an old tire that must have washed down from Yellow Mountain had crashed into the trees lining the banks. Some debris had become entangled; the rest was shooting downstream at a frightening rate of speed. Mrs. Murphy’s eyes widened. The roar of the water scared her.

As Harry started toward the creek she sank up to her ankle in trappy ground. Thinking the better of it, she backed off.

The leaden sky overhead offered no hope of relief. Cursing, her foot cold and wet, Harry squished back to the barn. She thought of her mother, who used to say that we all live in a perpetual state of renewal. “You must realize there is renewal in destruction, too, Harry,” she would say.

As a child Harry couldn’t figure out what her mother was talking about. Grace Hepworth Minor was the town librarian, so Harry used to chalk it up to Mom’s reading too many touchy-feely books. As the years wore on, her mother’s wisdom often came back to her. A sight such as this, so dispiriting at first, gave one the opportunity to rebuild, to prune, to fortify.

How she regretted her mother’s passing, for she would have liked to discuss emotional renewal in destruction. Her divorce was teaching her that.

Tucker, noticing the silence of her mother, the pensive air, said,
“Human beings think too much.”

“Or not at all”
was the saucy feline reply.

8

The rain picked up again midmorning. Steady rather than torrential, it did little to lighten anyone’s spirits. Mrs. Hogendobber’s beautiful red silk umbrella was the bright spot of the day. That and her conversation. She felt it incumbent upon her to call up everyone in Crozet who had a phone still working and inquire as to their well-being. She learned of Blair’s transformer’s being blown apart. The windows of the Allied National Bank were smashed. The shingles of Herbie Jones’s church littered the downtown street. Susan Tucker’s car endured a tree branch on its roof, and horror of horrors, Mim’s pontoon boat, her pride and joy, had been cast on its side. Worst of all, her personal lake was a muddy mess.

“Did I leave anything out?”

Harry cleaned out the letters and numbers in her postage meter with the sharp end of a safety pin. They’d gotten clogged with maroon ink. “Your prize pumpkin?”

“Oh, I brought her in last night.” Mrs. Hogendobber grabbed the broom and started sweeping the dried mud out the front door.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know I don’t have to but I used to do this for George. Makes me feel useful.” The clods of earth soared out into the parking lot. “Weatherman says three more days of rain.”

“If the animals go two by two, you know we’re in trouble.”

“Harry, don’t make light of the Old Testament. The Lord doesn’t shine on blasphemers.”

“I’m not blaspheming.”

“I thought maybe I’d scare you into going to church.” A sly smile crossed Mrs. Hogendobber’s lips, colored a bronzed orange today.

Fair Haristeen came in, wiped off his boots, and answered Mrs. Hogendobber. “Harry goes to church for weddings, christenings, and funerals. Says Nature is her church.” He smiled at his former wife.

“Yes, it is.” Harry was glad he was okay. No storm damage.

“Bridge washed out at Little Marilyn’s and at BoomBoom’s, too. Hard to believe the old creek can do that much damage.”

“Guess they’ll have to stay on their side of the water,” Mrs. Hogendobber said.

“Guess so.” Fair smiled. “Unless Moses returns.”

“I know what I forgot to tell you,” Mrs. Hogendobber exclaimed, ignoring the biblical reference. “The cat ate all the communion wafers!”

“Cazenovia at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church?” Fair asked.